New Kid on the Hallway

Apropos of nothing, because I like it

IMMIGRANT

November '63: eight months in London.
I pause on the low bridge to watch the pelicans:
they float swanlike, arching their white necks
over only slightly ruffled bundles of wings,
burying awkward beaks in the lake's water.

I clench cold fists in my Marks and Spencer's jacket
and secretly test my accent once again:
St. James Park; St. James Park; St. James Park.

-- Fleur Adcock

The most unwonderful time of the year

I know we're all supposed to be basking in the thankfulness of the season, spending time with family and eating good food and all that jazz, but this is a pretty sucky point in the year if you measure your year in semesters.

A wise academic blogger, commenting on the tenure fracas, said that it "seems more like end-of-semester-stress displacement than anything else."

And an equally wise law blogger pointed out that the ILs are freaking out. (No, children, buying your legal memo is NOT a good solution to your problems.) Darn it, I'm a 2L and I'm freaking out (slightly. I've been too busy catching up on sleep to freak out TOO much. Next week, I'll move right past freaking out to full-blown panic).

Since I pretty much read law blogs (mostly by students) and academic blogs (mostly by faculty), everyone is stressed and pissed off about now. Everyone's Facebook updates are about either what they have to grade or what they'll get a grade for. And I can't remember when I last read so many blog posts complaining about things that, honestly, don't seem like that big a deal. I think this is partly of function of everyone else's nerves wearing thin, so little things seem monstrous, and my OWN nerves wearing thin, so other people's (perfectly reasonable) complaints seem like ridiculous whining. 

Which maybe suggests I shouldn't post or comment much for the next few weeks.

I mean, I probably will. I just probably shouldn't.

Here's my latest ridiculous complaint about something completely unmonstrous: we had a guest speaker in one of my classes, someone with a Very Impressive Resume, who holds a Very Eminent Legal Position in my state and is widely recognized as brilliant. (This person is also about four years older than I am, sigh. How to feel underaccomplished.) Now, I think this person is wonderful--smart, interesting, interested in other people, and just an all around Nice Person. So I enjoyed the talk.

And then our prof asked the speaker what career advice they had for us young 'uns. The speaker's advice was perfectly reasonable: Be open to new experiences; when doors open, don't be afraid to walk through them. But I had to laugh a little, because the example the speaker used was, in the legal profession, kind of the equivalent of saying, "I never expected to be Secretary of State in a million years; it wasn't a direction I'd even considered. But when the President called me up and asked me to consider the position, I decided to go for it.* And you should always be willing to try new things when opportunities come your way." I mean, it was meant really nicely, yes? But my gut reaction was, You know, I don't think the President is going to be calling me up for QUITE a while. Like, never! Maybe some advice that's a little more directly applicable to my current situation would be more welcome?

But ooh, I can end on a positive note: the stupid Windows side of my computer has FINALLY downloaded all its stupid updates!! (This has seriously taken me two+ hours to deal with. I so hate Examsoft for not having a Mac-native version.)

Anyway, I hope that everyone gets the chance to chill out and relax and enjoy tomorrow. And if not, well, going back to school will be a relief, right?

*No, this person is/was NOT Secretary of State. It was a state government position, but I'm trying to be cagey, here.

Ceci n'est pas un comment

I am not taking part in the debate.*

But it's very odd to read discussions about tenure having been part of that system, and having left it.

Honestly, I think one of the biggest reasons why faculty get so wigged out about tenure is the horrific academic employment market. Because tenure means job security, and lack of tenure means (to many of the people involved, it seems, anyway) the increased possibility of getting fired.** And given how fricking impossible it is to get an academic job in the first place, and how hard it is to get to a second one in the second place--especially if, god forbid, you've settled in wherever you got hired, because getting another job will almost certainly mean uprooting and moving somewhere else, which, if you've actually put down roots and created a life for yourself, sucks royally--getting fired takes on a WHOLE DIFFERENT MEANING in academia than in other industries.

I mean, if you're a lawyer, and you get laid off, that sucks royally, too (especially--say it with me--IN THIS ECONOMY). But it is much less likely to mean that you have to uproot your entire household and move halfway across the country if you want to continue in the field for which you trained. You might move from one big firm to another, you might go from a big firm to a smaller firm, you might end up in government work, you might even hang up your own shingle. But the rest of your life will otherwise likely continue much as it always did. (That's a little less likely these days, but still, pretty likely.)

The actual fallout of getting fired as an academic, given the academic market, is largely independent of how you get fired--whether you don't get tenure, you get tenure but your institution declares financial exigency and cuts your department, or you're at an institution that never had tenure to begin with that doesn't renew your contract, the suckiness of getting fired is going to be pretty much a constant.

But the tenure system just means that it's a whole lot less likely that you will be fired.

Given the consequences of getting laid off as an academic, I understand why everyone likes that system so much. But it seems to me that the real problem underlying this element of tenure is not that eliminating tenure means that faculty are more likely to be fired. It's that if faculty are fired, there are so few other things they can (easily) do that involve what they're trained for.

You can also see this, I think, in the kinds of institutions less likely to have tenure. Community colleges are more likely not to offer tenure than four-year colleges and universities. Community colleges also tend to offer more professional/vocational kinds of degrees (e.g. nursing, business, graphic design, journalism). Most of the people who teach such subjects--or perhaps the preferred candidates to teach such subjects--are those who have significant experience in the professional world. Such people don't necessarily care about tenure because they can get jobs in their particular industry (many probably still have those jobs while teaching). For such faculty, getting fired would doubtless still suck, but it would be less likely to cause the same kind of upheaval in their lives as for the average academic at a four-year college or university.

And this, to me, points to the way the academic job market intersects with support for tenure. Which is an economic problem, and a problem facilitated by the proliferation of grad departments to supply TAs so that universities don't have to hire as many professors actually to teach. It's not about academic freedom, it's about supply and demand. And I don't think that ensuring that the few people who do get academic jobs can't get fired from them should have so much to do with the fact that so few people can get such jobs in the first place. Let's face it: would losing your job because your institution doesn't have tenure really be so unthinkable if you knew that, with a reasonable amount of effort, you could get another job doing the same thing in the same town?

I know that people are going to bring up academic freedom in response to this, the corporatization of the university and so on, which I haven't addressed here. I'm just not convinced that academic work is so very very different from every other kind of professional industry out there that it requires the protection of tenure. I'm not convinced that having a tenure system really prevents abusive employment practices. Honestly, I'm not convinced the tenure system does much besides reward people for subordinating every element of their life to their work.*** And I'm also not convinced that discussions of tenure and the need for tenure can be separated from the terrible economics of the academic job market, even though they're really not the same thing at all. 

*I don't really want to link; if you read around the academic blogosphere, or the corners I frequent at least, you probably know what I'm talking about. If you don't, you probably don't, but you might consider that a good thing.... 

**I'm still not convinced that abandoning tenure would actually lead to everyone getting fired all the time, but eh, I can't exactly prove that.

***This is NOT meant as any kind of insult to the many of my dear, dear friends who are tenured or on the tenure-track and accomplishing great things. I just think you'd have all done those things without tenure.

The semester is winding down

So, it appears that I've actually done better about posting here during the week, when I'm swamped with work, than on the weekend, when I actually have some free time.

Which I guess goes to show that the best incentive for blogging is procrastination.

We have all of Thanksgiving week off at my school, which is spectacular, except that it means everyone puts off serious outlining until break, and then we freak out about how behind we are. Okay, that might just be me.

I had a crazy (and unsubtle) dream last night: I dreamed that I was taking a final in my seminar. Which doesn't actually have a final exam. Which meant I was completely unprepared, and freaking out. I wrote something for the first part, turned it in, and left. But somehow after I left I realized there was a multiple-choice section I hadn't touched. So I ran back to the exam room and filled in, like, maybe 5 out of something like 40 questions. And all the while I'm thinking, "But this class doesn't HAVE a final..."

So next I'm talking to my prof and explaining that I didn't notice the multiple choice section. And my prof says, of their own volition, "Why don't you take extra time and finish?"

I don't even remember finished the exam, but the next thing I know, the prof has phoned me up to tell me that when they were adding my exam scores to their spreadsheet, there was a computer glitch, and they'd lost EVERYONE'S SCORES.

That was when I woke up.

I can't wait for finals to be over.

A law school question

Do others out there find the genus of gunner heavily skewed male? 

I can think of one woman in my year, overall, who might count as a gunner because she can tend to dominate a class. But she seems to do so because she's an uber law geek* who finds all her classes fascinating, she's a very expressive person who says exactly what's on her mind at a given moment, and she gets caught up in what's being talked about in class.

Whereas, honestly, the men I have in mind really do seem to contribute because they want to show everyone what they know. 

I hate to generalize about this and lord knows I've taught know-it-all female students in the past; I'm just describing how this seems to me. If anyone wants to share stories of female gunners, please do!

Although I suspect addressing this properly requires defining gunner (which I know I've talked about before but I'm too lazy to link, and my thinking has evolved somewhat). I have a two-pronged definition of gunner that's pretty simple: 1) are your comments in class more about what you know than about moving the class forward? and 2) do you make a lot of these comments?

Are there women out there who get labeled gunners for the same kinds of comments men make that men DON'T get labeled a gunner for?

Or am I just being sexist about this?

*I totally mean this as a compliment.

Life lesson

Something I realized today: I have finally grown up enough to figure out that when someone who gives you feedback makes you feel like crap, it probably doesn't mean that you actually are as stupid as they make you feel. Instead, they're probably just good at making people feel like crap. 

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

That's what it feels like when you miss one class to write a paper for another. (It feels a little more ironic when the same professor teaches both.)

This whole writing-a-paper-in-law-school thing has been extremely enlightening. And when I say paper here, I mean an actual academic paper, on a topic I pick and filled with my own ideas about the subject, rather than something like what gets assigned in Legal Writing (a memo or a brief, where you're handed the issue and what you come up with is the best way to spin the legal authority you dredge up on your subject, not any "new" insights on the matter. I mean, writing memos and briefs is creative, and it definitely requires analysis and insight and so on, but if all the case law out there says that 40-year-old married women with cats do not constitute a suspect class for hiring purposes, you're going to have a reeeeeeeeeeeeeallly hard time trying to argue that they should be, and will probably have to exercise your creativity in coming up with a different angle from which to advocate for your client. There are more constrictions; your exercise your creativity in trying to figure out how to deal with them. Whereas in an academic legal paper, you're free to write all about how bogus the case law is and why such women really SHOULD be a suspect class. I mean, you'd sound like an idiot making THAT particular argument, but you have more freedom to do so than you would in a brief).

See, I figured that I would be all over the academic paper thing. I mean, it's what I've done for the last umpteen years of my life, right? I know how to handle academic papers!

But I forgot that I also studied my previous subject for those umpteen years. I've mentioned here before how established skills deteriorate when you have to apply them to a new context (kind of like how college students might end up doing really well in Intro to Comp but when they have to write for a new class in a new field, they forget how to do things they'd been doing just fine in the familiar context). Struggling with this seminar paper, I'm brought right back to my early days in grad school, writing final papers for seminars when I was still taking classes in my Ph.D. program. There's a familiar panicky feeling of wanting to sit down and write, knowing you have a paper to do, but simply not having enough stuff in your head yet to come up with something substantial. And while the solution is simply to read stuff, learn more, put more stuff in your head so that you can start making connections and seeing what's going on, that panicky feeling makes it hard to focus on the material you really need to address. I look at the stack of cases and law review articles I could/should be reading for this paper, think, "I can't POSSIBLY get through all that," and waste a lot of time worrying when I should just be reading and thinking and then, only then, writing.

It's all part of learning new stuff, I realize that. I just really expected that I wouldn't have these problems any more. I completely forgot how much medieval stuff I managed to get in my head, and how much that facilitated churning out pages when need be. I've kind of mentally treated this seminar paper like a conference paper, which is off for two reasons: first, it's longer than a conference paper, and second, I just don't have the knowledge to dash it off the way I was able to do with conference papers, by the time I left academia.

On the bright side, though, one of the things that was also panicking me about this paper was feeling like I needed to have years of primary research under my belt before I could say anything useful about anything. It finally dawned on me: this paper isn't intended to be the masterful culmination of hugely sustained research into primary sources. It's a thought exercise. I need material about which to think (and seem to have managed to formulate a topic that requires more than some, of course), but the point is NOT to accumulate information, not in the way that it sometimes is in historical research. The point is to think of something and to communicate it. It was funny to realize how much historical argument is accomplished by accretion: by piling piece of evidence upon piece of evidence. You really don't do that in the same way in legal writing. Tis rather odd for me. 

Okay. Back to the paper I'm missing class to work on.

I'm so proud

I'm the number one result in Google for the search "wearing bright pink in law school."

Remember when I wrote back in the summer about dyeing my hair?

I did get my hair colored/highlighted before OCI interviews--nothing drastic, just some subtle highlights/lowlights that covered up the gray. In fact, I'm not quite sure what the stylist actually did, but it looked nice, and completely natural. And it's faded very naturally--no roots showing up.

But I think the gray hair wanted revenge.

Because before? It was all pretty much in my bangs, at the front of my head.

And now?

It's EVERYWHERE.

Okay, maybe not on the back of my head; I don't know, I can't look at it very closely. But there are gray hairs ALL over the rest of my head now!

I may hit that "full head of silver" sooner than I thought...

Because buying something new always makes things better

Does anyone out there share my belief that if I have the proper time management tools (planner and whatnot) I will magically become organized and productive? I definitely think this, however irrationally. Right now, I'm trying to decide if I want a new planner.

For about the last year I have been using my iPod Touch as a PDA. My go-to to-do list is Remember the Milk (free online, but $25/year to be able to sync between your computer and iPod). I really like the way RTM lets you put your tasks on different lists (job applications, Con Law, etc.), but also lets you look at all your tasks at once (Google Tasks lets you divide your to-dos among different lists, and I like the way you can integrate it with Google calendar, but you can't look at all of the tasks at once, so it's not so useful to me). You can also postpone tasks when you don't get them done on the day you'd planned (not that I would know anything about this, of course!), and tag with whatever label you like.

For scheduling, I use Google Calendar, although for most of the semester, my schedule is pretty fixed, so it's not that I have to check where I have to be at a given time; it's more a way to have a record of the things I've been doing, and to plan ahead (for instance, to see how far away finals are. About which I am currently in denial, kthxbai.)

Anyway, I went to these tools because I'm on my computer all. the. time. (since I take notes on my computer, I'm on the computer any time I'm in class, for instance), and the ability to enter something once on the computer and have it show up in my iPod was crucial.

But it's funny how you get bored with your tools, even if they're working (or maybe this is just me?). Because right now, I really hanker after my old paper-based blanner. I used to use this one:

 

The paper in this planner is nice and smooth and stands up to fountain pens (which I use a lot); I also like that the schedule is broken down by hour and that it's separate from the to-do list section. (I'd always write in my classes for the semester and fill in those blocks of time with different colored highlighters, because I'm OCD like that, but also because then I could glance at any day and see how much free time was left.) And I HAVE to have a page-per-day layout.

I think what I miss most about this planner is physically crossing tasks off my to-do list once I finished them. I really enjoyed crossing-out something I'd finished, and it was always uber-satisfying to look at a day's list and see 3/4 to all the tasks triumphantly struck-out. In Remember the Milk, completing a task merely erases it from the list, which makes sense (having all your completed tasks hanging around would get awfully cluttery, since it's not so date-centered), but just isn't as satisfying, because you always have tasks left staring at you, without any sign of what you have actually accomplished. (You can go back and look at completed tasks, but it's just not the same.) At this time of the semester, when I always have overdue tasks staring accusingly at me, I really miss seeing that I've at least accomplished SOMETHING.

But then, I do go back and forth: when I've been using a paper planner, I miss the slick graphics of the electronic world, where my schedule and tasks look far more elegant and organized than anything I can write on a page, where recurring tasks reappear as if by magic, where I can be a gadget-hipster tapping away with the tip of my finger. When I've been using the electronic planner, I miss the organicness of paper and pen, the way how neatly or messily I've written something tells you about how my day was going, how I could scrawl across the page, coloring outside the lines. I miss the layering of entries, where different inks or different pressure or even different angles of writing show how a day became progressively busier. And flipping back through paper pages is just different from clicking back through computer windows -- although paper is much more vulnerable to loss or destruction.

So. That's my latest retail therapy obsession. What about you guys? Are you paper or electronic planner people? Do you, like me, favor a particular planner because it makes you feel especially productive? Do you have other retail therapy obsessions at this point in the semester?